And thus they watched the Sunday morning landscape slip by, as they ran into Knarborough. They went out to a little restaurant to eat. It was one o’clock.
“Isn’t it strange, that we are travelling together like this?” she said, as she sat opposite him.
He smiled, looking into her eyes.
“You think it’s strange?” he said, showing his teeth slightly.
“Don’t you?” she cried.
He gave a slight, laconic laugh.
“And I can hardly bear it that I love you so much,” she said, quavering, across the potatoes.
He glanced furtively round, to see if any one was listening, if any one might hear. He would have hated it. But no one was near. Beneath the tiny table, he took her two knees between his knees, and pressed them with a slow, immensely powerful pressure. Helplessly she put her hand across the table to him. He covered it for one moment with his hand, then ignored it. But her knees were still between the powerful, living vice of his knees.
“Eat!” he said to her, smiling, motioning to her plate. And he relaxed her.
They decided to go out to Woodhouse on the tram-car, a long hour’s ride. Sitting on the top of the covered car, in the atmosphere of strong tobacco smoke, he seemed self-conscious, withdrawn into his own cover, so obviously a dark-skinned foreigner. And Alvina, as she sat beside him, was reminded of the woman with the negro husband, down in Lumley. She understood the woman’s reserve. She herself felt, in the same way, something of an outcast, because of the man at her side. An outcast! And glad to be an outcast. She clung to Ciccio’s dark, despised foreign nature. She loved it, she worshipped it, she defied all the other world. Dark, he sat beside her, drawn in to himself, overcast by his presumed inferiority among these northern industrial people. And she was with him, on his side, outside the pale of her own people.